BooksBarbecue
Back Before You Were Gone
Chapters (58)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Eight
  11. Nine
  12. Ten
  13. Eleven
  14. Twelve
  15. Thirteen
  16. Fourteen
  17. Fifteen
  18. Sixteen
  19. Seventeen
  20. Eighteen
  21. Nineteen
  22. Twenty
  23. Twenty-one
  24. Twenty-two
  25. Twenty-three
  26. Twenty-four
  27. Twenty-five
  28. Twenty-six
  29. Twenty-seven
  30. Twenty-eight
  31. Twenty-nine
  32. Thirty
  33. Thirty-one
  34. Thirty-two
  35. Thirty-three
  36. Thirty-four
  37. Thirty-five
  38. Thirty-six
  39. Thirty-seven
  40. Thirty-eight
  41. Thirty-nine
  42. Forty
  43. Forty-one
  44. Forty-two
  45. Forty-three
  46. Forty-four
  47. Forty-five
  48. Forty-six
  49. Forty-seven
  50. Forty-eight
  51. Forty-nine
  52. Fifty
  53. Fifty-one
  54. Acknowledgements
  55. An Eastbourne Murder Mystery
  56. Canelo Crime
  57. About the Author
  58. Also by Sheila Bugler

Emer was alone in the house. Her mother had gone to Dublin for a shopping weekend. Robert was out at a meeting and wouldn’t be home until later that night. She’d thought that finally knowing the truth would make a difference. But ever since finding out that Annie Holden wasn’t Kitty, Emer had felt more adrift than ever. She knew she had to accept what she’d been told. But she couldn’t let go of how she’d felt that day on the London Underground. The moment of absolute certainty when she’d realised she was looking at her sister. She still didn’t know how she had got it so wrong. How could you believe something so completely when it wasn’t true?

Earlier, Robert had tried to talk to her, find out what her plans were. When Emer told him she didn’t have any plans yet, he’d offered to speak to ‘some people’ and see if he could find her some short-term work. Not for the first time, Emer wondered how a man as kind as her stepfather had ended up with someone as selfish and self-centred as her mother. But maybe that was the only way it worked. Because she couldn’t think of anyone else who would be able to put up with her mother as patiently as Robert had done over the years. And despite her mother’s difficult personality, it was clear Robert adored her. A devotion Ursula took entirely for granted.

In the kitchen, Emer poured herself a glass of wine and carried it into the sitting room. Her laptop lay open on the sofa, Annie Holden’s face filling the screen. Annie’s eyes that looked so like Kitty’s. Emer had spent the last hour reading everything she could find about Annie. There wasn’t a lot, but she hoped seeing the facts of the woman’s life, laid out in black and white, would help her to accept this new truth. So far, it hadn’t worked. Because each time she looked at Annie’s photo, the doubts crept back in. No matter how many times she told herself the facts spoke for themselves, she wasn’t able to completely believe it.

Shutting down her laptop, she went over to Robert’s stereo – an old style Bang and Olufsen stereo with top-class speakers. Her stepfather had one of the best collections of vinyl Emer had ever seen. Earlier in the week, she had unearthed his John McCormack albums and was planning to work her way through them over the next few days.